[G4] Dual 450 Processors

[Alex]

On Sunday, Feb 8, 2004, at 09:04 Canada/Eastern, sr ferenczy wrote:

> actually, if an application is not programmed to take advantage of 
> having multiple threads, even os x cannot distribute the task to a 
> different processor.

True. What OS X does, however, is balance the load (app + all 
background processes) on the two processors, which does provide a 
performance benefit. As I wrote previously, "an application must be 
native and multithreaded to benefit fully" from SMP.

> i always take tests with a grain of salt (my real world experience is 
> all i worry about) [...]

Agreed. But let's not lose sight of the starting point. The issue is 
not, "Is DP better than SP?" -- I don't think anyone would argue with 
the answer, "In most cases, yes" -- but, "Does 450+450=900MHz". IMHO, 
yes, a DP Mac will perform better than an SP Mac, especially with 
applications which take advantage of SMP. (Note, for instance, in the 
benchmarks at the site you recommended, that Bryce 5's performance was 
only marginally better.) But, no, that is not a guarantee that you can 
run an application requiring 500Mhz minimum -- and Bryce 5 shows you 
why not.

> [...] the VT G5 cluster gets around 60% of the theoretical output, and 
> they have 2200 processors (think of the over head on that)

Does the VT cluster run Mac OS X -- and is it really relevant to our 
issue?

f